‘To Steven Jobs on His Thirtieth Birthday’ (Apple tribute video)

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 202 recordings of Steve Jobs →

1. 1984

   Interview with Michael Moritz

   A 1984 filmed interview with journalist Michael Moritz in which Jobs reflects that making something truly outstanding takes more patience and perseverance than expected. The Steve Jobs Archive features it in its ‘Put Something Back’ exhibit.

2. 1984

   ‘1944’ internal sales film (Jobs as FDR)

   A nearly nine-minute World War II-themed in-house film that parodies the ‘1984’ commercial to rally Apple’s international sales team against IBM; Jobs appears as President Roosevelt around the 5:30 mark. A companion ‘Blue Busters’ Ghostbusters spoof from the same meeting features Wozniak and a Jobs cameo.

3. 1984

   ‘1984 Macintosh Year in Review’ sales-conference video

   A short in-house recap of the Macintosh’s first year, shown to Apple’s sales force at the 1984 sales conference and tagged by the archive as featuring Jobs and Wozniak. A minor companion to the launch-year material.

4. 1984

   ‘Blue Busters’ Ghostbusters spoof (Jobs cameo)

   A four-minute Ghostbusters parody made for Apple’s 1984 international sales meeting, in which Apple staff including Steve Wozniak hunt IBM ‘blue’ ghosts; Jobs makes a cameo. It is the companion piece to the better-known ‘1944’ film from the same meeting.

5. 1984

   ‘In Search of Excellence’ at Apple Computer (documentary segment)

   The Apple chapter of the ‘In Search of Excellence’ television documentary, uploaded by Andy Hertzfeld himself, with interviews of Jobs and Mac team members Chris Espinosa, Burrell Smith, Susan Kare, Hertzfeld, Rony Sebok, Bud Tribble and Joanna Hoffman, ending on the Macintosh factory run by Debi Coleman.

6. 1985

   1985 shareholders meeting: Macintosh Office, LaserWriter and AppleTalk

   At the annual meeting Jobs reads a child’s letter about Apple, lays out a two-year plan to take the Mac into the office as an alternative to IBM, and introduces the LaserWriter ($6,995), the AppleTalk network and a file server, plus Andy Hertzfeld’s Switcher demo that ‘dazzled the crowd’.

7. 1985

   ‘To Steven Jobs on His Thirtieth Birthday’ (Apple tribute video)

   A five-minute tribute film produced by Apple’s creative-services group for the black-tie 30th-birthday party Jobs threw at the St. Francis Hotel (where Ella Fitzgerald sang), compiling footage of Jobs from his Apple years just three months before his ouster.

8. 1985

   Lund University visit: Apple University Consortium Europe inauguration

   In jeans and a white shirt, weeks before his final break with Apple, Jobs tells Lund academics the computer is ‘a new medium’ and imagines a future machine that could capture the mind of ‘the next Aristotle’ so students could ask him questions; he dismisses the 1985 industry slump as a delay of an inevitable revolution and says his next stop is the Soviet Union to sell Macintoshes.

9. 1985

   Newsweek On Air: ‘Steve Jobs’ segment on his resignation (radio)

   Five days after Jobs’s resignation letter, Newsweek’s radio hour devotes a segment to him, with California Technology Stock Letter editor Michael Murphy and San Francisco correspondent Michael Rogers, who had just interviewed Jobs for the magazine’s cover story on his departure.

10. 1985

    ‘The Entrepreneurs’ – PBS documentary on NeXT’s first year

    A rare 1985-86 PBS documentary following Jobs and the NeXT founding team through strategy retreats, with Paul Rand unveiling the NeXT logo and Joanna Hoffman confronting Jobs about his ‘reality distortion’. Jobs says the company is ‘architecting a company’ more than building a product.

11. 1987

    BBC interview on computers in higher education

    A year before the NeXT Cube launch, Jobs explains what higher education needs from workstations: simulations of historical models, tools designed by observing scholars, and the first major curriculum shift since the 1960s.

12. 1987

    BBC interview at Pixar’s first-anniversary party

    Short BBC footage from Pixar’s one-year anniversary party, focusing on Pixar and ILM, with Jobs and Ed Catmull on camera and Alvy Ray Smith and Loren Carpenter in audio.

13. 1988

    Comment on the Apple v. Microsoft GUI lawsuit

    A short 1988 clip of Jobs, then at NeXT, commenting on Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuit against Microsoft over the graphical user interface.